Tried playing “Shaken, Not Poisoned” three nights ago, and it was a fun time. Very interesting to see my wife and mum try it out with me. Lots of good points came out of trying it, and there were some improvements to be made.

It seems like the rules could be a bit too tough to pick up the first time. People were too focused on what they needed to do instead of checking reactions when moving cards around. We only really played two hands, so it’s hard to tell.

As expected, the poison card picking didn’t turn out too well, since people could pick up a poison card of someone they were protecting, and would know they didn’t have to try and protect that spy this round. Going to try fixing that by adding double the amount of poison cards, because that way you won’t know if there are two or one poison cards in the deck and it means that two people could be attacking the same target.

If two people attack the same person, no one will get points and those cards are discarded for the round. Play will continue until someone is poisoned or protected.

Players were playing poison cards all the time, and it seemed that pulling off a protect is much harder than successfully poisoning someone, so a protect will be worth 2 points and a poison will be worth 1 point. Might add some guest cards as well, so that people don’t play a card all the time.

It’s still a quick party game with a small number of cards, so I’m glad that’s working out. I think having some small rules card would be a big help to players. I don’t think there’s much there to explain, just the moving and the positions that people need to be in to attack and defend. Might put some drink recipes on the poison cards as well, to get the player that was poisoned to drink. That could be fun!